The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win Paperback – 16 Oct. 2014

Let's face it - we're all in the middle of a new Industrial Revolution - only this time it's about the automation of information processing. As with the original Industrial Revolution, the impacts of automation on people and skills needed are profound. People who don't understand what's happening will be at a disadvantage. Yet people who have read and understood the implications of this book will have insights into the parallels between what happened with manufacturing automation and what will inevitably happen with the automation of information processing. Only people who have this insight are in a position to identify the root causes of many of the world's cirrent social, political and economic challenges. Simply trying to maintain inefficient, slow and unpredictable working practices (as common in 'legacy' IT environments as it once was in pre Industrial Revolution manufacturing) is not the answer. Establishing consensus between technical and non-technical stakeholders both about what is worthwhile and what is achievable given constraints of time,cost and resources (including people, processea and technology) is vital. This book goes a long way towards responding to the challenges of today's Industrial Revolution, bur most importantly it provides enough wisdom about the fundamental forces that are in play today to allow readers to devise their own personal responses. Before reading tbis book I was aware of most of the underlying theory and technologies and had encountered work colleagues similar to the archetypes represented by the characters in this book, but only when I read this book did the big picture of what is going on in the world at large become so clear. Now that I have gained these new insights, I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with responsibility for social/political/economic planning, organisational managemt, operational research, systems engineering, information security or information technology. Finally, a word of warning: this book can easily be read over the course of two days.but as it's a gripping read you may want to plan to start it when you have an interruption-free weekend coming up...

The "DevOps" movement must have hit a new milestone with the publication of the first novel on the subject (yes as in an entertaining work fiction).To anyone familiar with the Eliyahu M. Goldratt's "The Goal", The Phoenix Project will feel pleasantly familiar.To anyone unfamiliar with The Goal, it is basically the crusade of a middle manager faced with the challenge of turning around a failing manufacturing plant to save it from closure. This challenge is supported by a quirky physicist adviser who uses the Socratic method to reveal how to apply scientific reasoning in favour of conventional manufacturing processes and economics. Throughout The Goal book, there are lots of simple models designed to explain the principles and teach you something. It makes you feel good whilst you are reading it, but at the end a little uncertain whether you've actually learnt anything.Modernise the hero and substitute their dysfunctional manufacturing plant for a dysfunctional IT Operations team, and you aren't too far off The Phoenix Project. In fact it is almost a sequel in The Goal series. A manufacturing plant which could easily have been from the The Goal is used heavily in The Phoenix Project to highlight what manufacturing can teach IT. - This is a great metaphor that I definitely subscribe to.So is The Phoenix Project entertaining and do you actually learn anything?I certainly found it highly entertaining, the observations were very sharp and definitely reminiscent of things I've seen. There are plenty of familiar examples of poor decisions about trying to go too fast at the expense of quality and stability, unpredictability and mayhem. All exciting stuff to a DevOps freak.Do you learn anything from the Phoenix Project? Perhaps mostly just through re-evaluating your own experiences. There isn't a huge amount of substance in the book and in fact, it appears to be a fairly shameless plug for the author's next book, the DevOps Cookbook:[...]In summary, personally I recommend reading either the Phoenix Project or the Goal and I eagerly await the Cookbook.

A good book written in a form of a fictional novel that portrays the classical (and somewhat extreme) challenges of an IT Operations which hasn't kept pace with the time and doesn't have effective ways of working to get things done in a coordinated and timely fashion. The book takes you through the dramatic highs and lows of a day in the life of IT Ops executives and depicts the importance of IT in realising (or not) organisation's strategy/competitive edge. It shows the importance of the IT best practices such as DevOps and Agile in a most practical and pragmatic way without making it too academical or mundane to read.